Maigret and his master

Georges Simenon: Could write a novel in two weeks, and boasted that he restricted his vocabulary to 2000 words.

Georges Simenon will go down in writing history as the creator of one of the most popular heroes ever. Simon Caterson reports on his centenary year.

Not all of crime fiction's most celebrated detectives are renowned for their brilliant logical deductions made from uncannily shrewd observation. Unlike his colleagues Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Detective Inspector Jules Maigret, commissaire of the Paris police, relies on intuition as much as fact, and empathy more than evidence.

Georges Simenon, the Belgian novelist who created Maigret, did not set out to create puzzles for the reader to solve. Maigret is more interested in why the crime has been committed rather than how, and his judgements on the people involved are moral rather than legal. What Maigret lacks in procedural rigour, he makes up for in the intimacy of his relationship with the criminal world.

The character of Maigret reflects the strange character and preoccupations of its creator. Simenon is one of the world's most popular crime writers and also one of the least orthodox. With worldwide sales of 500 million, he was the most widely read living writer of his era.

Simenon was born 100 years ago and died in 1989. In his hometown of Liege, the square opposite the former family home has been renamed Maigret Square in honour of his centenary. Simenon-themed exhibitions, film festivals and conferences are taking place throughout Europe and America. Several new editions of his books are being released in French and English. Six titles have just been published in Australia under the Penguin Classics imprint. They join the handful already reissued locally by Duffy & Snellgrove and Allen & Unwin.

Apart from his best-selling fiction, Simenon is also remembered for his prodigious sexual appetite. Headlines were created in 1977 when he casually told an interviewer that he had slept with 10,000 women, of whom 80 per cent were "les filles publiques". His second wife later supplied an estimate of 1200 in total, based on her intimate knowledge of his insatiability.

One of the more colourful events of the Simenon centenary is the premiere of the musical Simenon and Josephine, based on the relationship between Simenon and Josephine Baker, the African-American exotic dancer, in Paris in the 1920s. Simenon, who sometimes found himself lying to as many as four women in one day, took the job of part-time secretary to Baker in order to explain to his wife why he was spending so much time with another woman, and even edited her fan-club newsletter.

In a precursor to the current obsession with Kylie Minogue's bottom, Simenon said of Baker's derriere: "It is, without question, the most famous bottom in the world. It must be the only bottom that has become the centre of a cult. And it is everywhere, on music sheets, on magazine covers, plastered all over the city's walls, because it is the only bottom that laughs!"

Whether or not Simenon's boast of 10,000 sex partners is true - and the available evidence seems to suggest it is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility - his literary strike-rate is, if anything, even more impressive. Simenon's output of novels and autobiographies is staggering. In a career spanning more than 50 years, he published more than 400 titles, of which nearly a quarter feature Maigret. Half of them were published under various pseudonyms.

Simenon's output exceeds that of contemporaries such Agatha Christie, who herself produced 85 books. The nearest Australian equivalent is Alan Yates, who published more than 270 novels, most of them writing as Carter Brown. In the case of Simenon, the sheer quantity did not necessarily mean that quality was compromised. Though he never won his much-coveted Nobel Prize for Literature, Simenon enjoyed both popular success and a measure of critical respect. As one English critic commented, "He is frequently impossible, but never does he allow himself to descend to the improbable."

According to British author Patrick Marnham, whose biography, The Man Who Wasn't Maigret, has just been reissued for the centenary, Simenon consorted with criminals and prostitutes. At certain times in his life he also came close to becoming a career criminal himself: "Like Maigret, Simenon had been born in the same streets as criminals, and had plundered the same shop tills." Simenon carried a considerable burden of guilt of his own for deeds such as using his father's pocket-watch, a gift from a dying man, to pay for a visit to a brothel.

The newly reissued Simenon novels give a good idea of the unique quality of his fiction. In The Bar on the Seine, Maigret visits a murderer in prison with the news that his reprieve has been denied and he will be executed the following day. The condemned man tells the detective a tale of unsolved murder and blackmail that centres on a shady bar. Maigret mounts a rather casual investigation that involves much drinking and apparently idle conversation.

Simenon's non-Maigret fiction is represented by The Stain in the Snow, which is an exceptionally dark depiction of a teenage thief, pimp and murderer. Frank Friedmaier is evil but devilishly attractive: "Someone had likened him to a young bull that could never find satisfaction. Certainly you were reminded of something essentially sexual at the sight of broad, glossy face, his damp eyes and his inflated lips."

The realistic, anti-romantic quality of Simenon's fiction, which Marnham characterises as "studded with absurdities rather than heroism", was also influenced by the author's experience of war. As a teenager he became involved in black-market activities during the German occupation of Belgium during the First World War, and later did much the same thing during World War Two. Unlike his compatriot, the literary theorist Paul de Man, Simenon's posthumous reputation has survived allegations of collaboration with the Nazi regime even though he allowed nine of his books to be filmed by a German film company.

Trained in his teens as a newspaper reporter, Simenon's work-rate was phenomenal and the flow of books was uninterrupted during periods of emotional crisis. He was able to write a novel in two weeks, sometimes less. He was economical with his material, writing short novels mostly based around one major character. He also claimed to have limited himself to a vocabulary of 2000 words.

Simenon's attitude to the production of his work recalls the comment Oscar Wilde made about smoking: "A cigarette is a perfect type of perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied." Simenon sought to create a similar effect with his novels, supplying just enough text to make the reader want more. As anyone who reads a lot of today's new novels would know, it is a skill possessed by few contemporary writers.

Simenon's sexual and literary profligacy appear to have sprung from a shared source. According to Patrick Marnham, Simenon needed sex "for the same reason he wrote: because he had an unsatisfied hunger for human contact". Marnham writes that sex and writing formed a chaotic but necessary relationship: "Most people work every day and enjoy sex periodically. Simenon had sex every day and every few months enjoyed a frenzied orgy of work."

For their part, Simenon's wives and mistresses tolerated, even facilitated, his infidelities, and indeed it was an accepted part of the job description of his personal assistants that they have regular sex with their employer. One of these women, Teresa Sburelin, was originally hired as a maid but became Simenon's mistress for 23 years.

Within his own family, Simenon's relationships with women were complicated. One explanation offered for his depravity is the absence of any love from his mother. Most tragically of all, Simenon's bizarrely over-protective attitude towards his only daughter, Marie-Jo, may have contributed to her suicide in 1978 at the age of 25. In one of the cruellest of literary ironies, she shot herself with a gun she bought from a dealer whose name she found mentioned in one of her father's novels.